


The Sun on Jakku

by Umbreon_ly



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (developing slowly), Coming of Age, Drama, F/M, Force Bond, Growing Up, Near end of the story there will be, Possessive Kylo Ren, Rey had droid friends...for a time, Rey survives on Jakku but Kylo goes mad in the desert sun, This is 75 percent Kylo watching young Rey suffer on Jakku, a bit of horror, and 25 percent actual Reylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22063708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbreon_ly/pseuds/Umbreon_ly
Summary: Recovering from his greatest defeat and humiliation, Kylo Ren lies in Medical and bleeds and sees visions of a little girl in a desert, growing up and starving and learning and fighting and feeling what he felt when he was young. He stills and watches her, for hours. For years. He’s with her right now.(In the short time between TFA and TLJ, Kylo sees into Rey's youth and life on Jakku, every long suffering day, till the day he meets her, and then beyond. Rey can cope with the life she had to lead, in her closed-off way, but Kylo cannot.)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	The Sun on Jakku

**Author's Note:**

> A fic I first started drafting in mid-2016, before TLJ had a trailer or a name and am now restarting/posting. At the time the Force Bond obviously wasn’t canon yet either but I had heard of the concept, so I first started this fic to build that on my own. (Also to fulfill my heart’s desire of Kylo crying at Rey’s awful Jakku life) This will mostly take place between TFA And TLJ and be mostly TLJ-compliant. But not TROS-compliant. No thanks. The disappointment of believing that anything meant anything will sting for years.

She cut his face and he can’t see. The wounds are catching up to him now, numbness turning to active aches while he’s helpless on his back in the snow. Throbs and stings and callous pain hang on him, like always, but he tries to move still. He tries to lift up to see _her_ and spit out the blood pooling behind his teeth. Kylo succeeds in spitting out the blood.

The planet’s surface groans. The trees sway off their roots. Smoke billows up from the core’s eternal fires in the chasm. But Kylo Ren is no eternal fire. He is stepped upon and trounced, a stain upon the ground. The planet is burning up from the inside, his hot blood is spilling into the snow, but all the rest of him is cold and weak. The whole of him is just a failure.

The chasm far to his right belches fire. It throws snow and hot wind about with a serpentine hiss of air. It smothers the sound of his groan of pain. In the din of self-destruction, blood leaks over his browbone into his eye. His whole fucking face hurts. This stranger from nowhere ripped his face open.

When the very ground shifts up from a quake, his lightsaber rolls back towards him and claps against his unwounded side. By instinct he grabs the weapon but it cannot protect him. By the flashes in his eyelids every time he blinks, he can still see the rogue Stormtrooper in front of him. By a thread in the Force that won’t untangle from him, by the hole in his flesh and his face, he can still see the scavenger, as though she is still near. His saber hand, his right, is twitching like it wants to move, to reach all on its own—

His hand—his father’s ha—

Kylo’s fist lashes out and beats against the ground, through an infinitesimal layer of snow and hard into the dirt below. Sediment and small rocks jolt up from the ground. His hand screams with pain, he screams till he sees his breath. There’s an insistent voice on the edge of his mind, stepping quickly inward. Soon it will be too close to ignore. Gasping now, he shuts his eyes against it.

Trees nearby are falling and tearing up out of the ground. They are thrown away, into others, crashing into chunks of broken wood. They are going up in unnatural fire while Kylo sees nothing at all. He knows his mother felt what he did. She would— _she will—_

He tries to roll onto his side to manage a helpless physiological response, an urge to vomit, but the fainting sensation is yet stronger. Like mercy, like indifference, his body wants to quit this effort. What he can’t suffer now will await and strike him later.

 _I—lost—everything—_ he felt, rather than thought. _I—threw away—_

Someone grabs at his left shoulder, near where the scavenger jabbed her saber into his muscle. Kylo yells and reaches for the attacker with one hand. It comes away holding bits of some droid armpiece. Adrenaline spent already, his arm and the metal junk falls back into the snow. 

Hux appears. His hair is loose, falling onto his cheeks.

“Sedate him now or we’re not making the ship.”

“Hhhelp me u-up, Hux. Now,” Kylo spits at him.

But the redheaded rat only stares at him, upside down, while Kylo feels an uncomfortable prick in his collarbone. The sedative strikes and slows him immediately, as they must to be useful on him. Seconds after, the trees all around him are walking away, as though they do not want to associate with him. Uneven patches of snow, smoke and brown earth float past. Straps are tying him onto a flatback droid. Hux is behind somewhere yelling out. Perhaps at the trees, telling them not to associate with him.

“She’s getting a-WAY,” shouts a stranger who sounds a lot like him. The man’s voice is unfiltered pain and rage. Thank the Maker he’s tied down now.

The only response is the deafening breakdown of nature. A felled branch from a tree hits the ground as they run and its branches strike him in the face. They sting on his open wound but he doesn’t blink. Far ahead is a great line of fire and incoming bouts of lava. They will soon smother the little pit in the snow where his body had been. From his body to that spot is a heavy, thick line made by this thing that dragged him. The whole view tilted away with the familiar, controlled lurch of a landing ramp withdrawing. The breakdown of an ecosystem was cut out of sight.

The flatback droid smoothly transfers him to a cushioned medical table. He blinks grit and tears away. The harsh, contrasting colors from the light outside are gone and replaced with sedated, manmade dark things. The walls and ceiling are black and ribbed. Beige boxes are strapped down against the walls and a white medcart has already been brought to his side. A droid is pulling tools out of it. Around them, the ship sways as it takes off. In front of him, the droid appears with needles and some type of scalpel he doesn’t want to see. So he turns away.

He turns to her, instead in his mind. He turns and she’s blocking his side strike and backing away. But she won’t get away, he won’t let her. The tree cover is too thin, her comrades are too far, and in that moment it seemed that there was nowhere on Starkiller where she can truly hide from him. She can’t hide on the cliffside where he holds her and offers her what she must have. When a droid presses hard on the bowcaster wound on his stomach, he grinds his teeth and ferociously ignores it. He waits for her to accept his offer.

He waited on her word and she turned on him. In one moment, he was hearing her heartbeat and breath. And she heard his. They breathed in time with each other. He’d told her _I feel it too_ and she must have felt it then as well. That was—that was—

That was nothing to her. Not after she made a decision. In the next moment, she was striking like a young god with menacing blows that made his arms tremble as he blocked. She stabbed him and cut him.

 _Heat_ invading his skin and his face deeper than it ever should. Too shocked to scream.

He fell onto his back in front of her. He was shedding tears through the burning pain and trying to get up and see her again. The wounded shoulder stopped him. Pain. She was gone—it hurt—

The droid announces the completion of cleaning the wound site. It hurt.

A second droid with louder, bumpier wheels comes in and starts jabbing and beeping like the first one. It aims for his face. He refuses to pay it any attention. He’s back in a better place with the scavenger. Being In a field of snow and alone with her felt more right than anything burning around them or anything he had burned himself.

After she started fighting back, she struck like she knew how he moved. Like they had the same brain but she was too ignorant to know it. This shouldn’t have been stopped the way it was. The damn droid shouldn’t still be stabbing at him so he twitching one finger to lift it up and flip it over.

While the droid beeps its alarm, Kylo gags. His whole body is erupting with electricity and then it isn’t. While he pants he looks up at Hux who has appeared over him, frowning like he does.

“Will you _stop_ moving _!?_ I’m trying to save your life, you worthless fucking child!” Hux screams. There is a tiny stun-blaster in the general’s right hand.

Hux’s gloved hand replaces the spot the second droid had been jabbing him. It was the bare skin of his shoulder, where the scavenger’s final strike had torn through his outer coat before it got to his face. Hux’s glove over his own skin feels some sort of unpleasant. 

“I am _trying_ to stitch you up and keep you alive. If you really want a pus-oozing scar underneath your clothes, you can have one, see if I care. I received no command to make you comfortable.”

He hears most of the words and sees a mostly-clear mental picture of the rogue Stormtrooper trapped against a tree. Wailing his pain but free from his conscripted post. He was gone, too, and—and even his Wookie uncle was gone, he realized with a choked gasp. He is shaken. Everything inside scrambled.

Kylo meekly whispers, “Is Starkiller gone?”

“Gone.” It was that and nothing else, as Hux would not explain further. But he’d had no other thoughts about it anyhow.

“Th—the scavenger.” He tries again. His throat has a little blood in it, still. “Gone?”

Hux’s face changes somehow but Kylo’s weak eyes can’t pinpoint what part shifted or moved. “Probably not. A few officers glimpsed the Correllian freighter escaping with the rebels.”

“ _She’s_ on the Millennium Falcon?”

A snide smirk splits the general’s mouth. “That’s what it’s called? Yes. She was probably on it. It took off not far from where you were. I wouldn’t guess for a second that we were lucky enough to be rid of her.

At first he’s thinking of her escaping the doomed planet. Escaping death. Thank the Maker. Then the phrase _Be rid of her_ brings something else to mind.

He sees pictures of little mechanical parts held by small gloved hands and thinks about people throwing them away and being _rid of them?_ The droids around his medbay table are of First Order-make, incompatible with the strange old parts he’s thinking about. And there’s no reason to think about them. He doesn’t know what they are. He looks around the room for the objects, for the sight and source of this thought. But nothing in the room looks like them. To General Hux, it only looks like the madman tied to the table can’t comprehend the sight of a medbay room.

“We’re meeting the Supreme Leader.” General Hux tells him some time later. “We’ll board his ship in three days and you are to explain yourself to him. Understand?”

He says yes and looks away.

“And stay still for your examination, for Maker’s sake.” Hux adds. “Unless you really want a massive infection. If you stop fussing, you can be in a bacta tank in ten minutes and sleep the rest of the way.” He stops. Glares. “Bastard.”

“Don’t you have cadets to step on?” Kylo growls back.

“Phasma’s cadets could all step on _you_ quite easily, if some skinny slave bitch could apparently do it. Or did that Stormtrooper do it? Did they gang up on you?” The general’s contempt slides somewhere near spiteful curiosity by the end, but Kylo Ren takes no notice of the change. He hears an ugly name falling through Hux’s mouth and he raises his hand towards it to kill it. General Hux slaps a hand onto his throat, trying to gasp.

Despite the wounds he says clearly, “ _Don’t_ —insult her.”

Hux’s eyes squint a little and he chokes out something that sounds like “what,” but it’s nothing to Kylo Ren, who keeps squeezing his prey. It’s a distraction, it’s the relief he needs—and then it stops.

As his head falls back a few inches onto the table, Kylo sees _a bright bright bright field of dirt that’s golden-brown and empty except for one crooked comm tower with corroded metal plates and a person sits at the base in its thin branch of shade the person has clothes that are pale and tan and their knees are up and their face is hidden and drawn into their knees but he knows they are only smearing one sweaty surface against another because it’s so so hot outside he’s gasping in th–_

He and General Hux are both choking.

Kylo’s head smacks back onto the table and he takes in a huge, shuddering breath. His eyes are huge, too, his eyes madly darting. There’s no memory, no trail of thought to trace where that idea came from; it had attacked him and then bolted away. Already he’s kicking away at the new thoughts that come to fill the void. To block them, he brings up a memory of the Stormtrooper stumbling backward. He has no idea how to wield a weapon like a saber.

At last Hux comes into view again. “You’ll be going into the bacta tank whenever I _happen_ to remember to come check on you again.” He exits from view, becoming only the tap of boots on the floor. Then he is huffing and cursing as the door slides open for him, and then is nothing except gone. 

Alone now, Kylo Ren finally breathes. His pupils are dilating.

In his mind’s eye was another picture of the scavenger escaping him. But _escape_ brings its own trail of dread. He cannot escape punishment for this failure in capturing her. Try as he might to reject and block the thought, it pries at him so that he must look. The Supreme Leader will pry him open, too. Break his thoughts and his bones. 

It’s one of the most familiar scenes of life. Or one he can’t be rid of. Because he is a failure. For each failure he can’t make up for, and there will be no making up for this loss, he will be on the hard black floor. He will be gasping and thrown onto the ground. He will be on fire without real flames and every ugly, weak, sinful thought will be displayed for the Master to touch. Master knows what he wants and is afraid of, and when he is tired and when he walks and sleeps and shits and obeys. He’ll know how—fucking—useless—what he did, looking evenly into his eyes while saying _Thank you_ —

Kylo stifles the physical impulse to cry. In his mind, in the Force, he is leaving this place and leaving this cocoon of pathetic, collared servitude and failure—going elsewhere. But the pain doesn’t leave and his scar is pulsing.

The scavenger put this scar between his eyes. Her hands opened his skin, opened up the whole of him, and he couldn’t close himself now. He can’t close himself to his father—a name he won’t finish because he is rattling and hyperventilating on the table.

He grabs for the scavenger or else he will burst and die. He wanted to carry her. It felt right and purposeful to trail after her and the Stormtrooper in the snow. It would be right again. Someday, because of her, he felt, he would not bleed out and break and fail anymore. Through the fog and hateful black spires of the Dark side that made him who he is, a light shone through. _She_ had bled out, and been broken, like him, and she was still here. 

She was still here, he thought, in a way.

Kylo sees

he sees—

—

She looked into the merciless sun and immediately ducked her head at the intense light. Her arm was held in a merciless grip, the heat was merciless and heavy, the pulsing fear nauseating. She knew no words to describe the terror of her mother’s ship taking off without her, so she screamed.

They were in the ship landing yard, a blank plain of sand marked only by the parked vehicles and the beacons set in place for night fliers. Three other ships sat on the sand and two of them whirred their engines. The blast, the wind, the rushing heat, drowned out her wails. She pulled and kicked against the grip of a sentient who held her but ignored her.

Two engines nearby shut down. 

The girl pulled against that hard grip again and screamed mightily, “I’m still here, wait! _I’m still here!_ ”

The hateful thing that held her wrist all this time yanked her backward so that she fell against its body. She whirled around and pulled on his arm, too. “Please help, they left without me—”

The sentient lifted her up by the arm so that her legs left the ground. It was pink and almost human-shaped, and a species she didn’t recognize stood impatiently next to him. Both of them had humanlike scowls. 

He told her to shut up. Then he hurled her down onto the ground like he was killing a fish and she was silenced.

Kylo convulsed on the medbay table.

The girl’s bladder let go and her consciousness let go, if only for a minute.

_Wait_

_Wait_

_Help plea—_

The adult conversation went on without her, and she without it, into pulsing pain that replaced the whole world around her. A wind blew and tossed sand directly into her mouth and eyes. For the very first time.

The first thing she noticed outside of the pain was a speeder parked nearby, floating a little in the air. A large feline sat in the shade underneath it, looking at her.

“And he’ll deliver six days from now.”

“Pray to your black god that he does or you can starve.”

 _You can starve,_ rang and rang and rang inside her.

After an age, the adults’ conference was done and the pink sentient lifted her up a second time. “Are you ready to shut up and listen?” She was filled with dread and nothing else. “You’re with me now. I have a scrap-collecting business and you’re gonna work for me. Starting today.” The girl thought _‘work’_ mindlessly and recoiled from it. _Work_ was an adult word, made up of fancy suits and bottles and holos and it should have nothing to do with her.

After a few seconds of grace, the sentient asked her, “Do you understand that you are going to work for me or not?”

She asked why she couldn’t go home and he told her. 

The girl’s memory collapsed.

He collapsed and did not remember the droids beginning to stitch his scars.

The sun-spotted feline under the speeder walked away.

Unkar Plutt walked away.

“Do you have a name or not?” he asked over his shoulder.

She was walking behind him, somehow. They were near the very front of the yard and not the back. They passed a fuel hauler savaged by time and invasive weaponry. A spotted sandcat was barely visible in the scarred paint, made from yellow to gold by the rays of bright, bright light. She used to want a pet cat.

She thinks of a name and tells him what her name is.

“Rey,” Unkar Plutt said, and then he told her about _meals_ and _kids_ and she processed nothing else. She said nothing to him and asked no questions, but stayed close behind, lest he become displeased with her again.

Some other sentients she didn’t recognize were in the landing yard, walking, chatting, trading things between their hands. She looked at them to ask them for help instead, but chose not to. She chose to press her hands into her scrunched up face and over her mouth. Her breaths turned to squeaks and then tiny, high-pitched sobs. All sentients that she passed saw and heard them. Unkar Plutt gave the child a single grace of ignoring them.

Rey looked back in the direction of where her parents’ ship had taken off, and the last spot in the sky she’d been able to observe it flying. She looked back at the strangers milling around. She looked for help. But nobody came. 

She stayed near Mr. Plutt.

Both of them walked from the yard into Niima Outpost proper, which was a little mess of civilization. It had more tents than metal or durasteel structures and nothing with foundations: everything was built on top of the sand and built out of old and harvested material. The place was dark-green, brown, gray and rusted. In shaded tents and ramshackle stalls, it sold engine blocks, solar cells and screws, goggles and tarps and inedible animal skin. A guard armed with a glowing red blaster eyed Rey as she passed.

Plutt stopped at a storage shed at the end of a street, within sight of his main trading post. He fiddled with keys while Rey shivered behind him. When the door opened, he grunted, “Get in,” and she rushed inside to obey.

Inside were three children. One was Sluissi, a humanoid torso atop a serpentine body. One was human, all wrapped up in grey robes with its face in its knees. The third child was kicked by Plutt’s hard boot and disappeared into a messy pile of tarps against the opposite wall.

“I told you never stand near the door when I’m unlocking,” Plutt asserted to the child in the tarps.

“Yes, Mr. Plutt,” Rey gasped helplessly. But he ignored her and shut the door.

The horrid tension she’d miraculously held in burst. She fell to her knees, hands to her eyes, and wailed. She wailed for her mother. She wailed at the leftover pulse of pain in her side from Plutt hurting her. She wanted only to hide, to be at home—something struck her on top of her head.

“Is she a Chiss?”

“No, wrong color.”

“She’s molerat-colored!” The thing struck her again.

“Stop it!” Rey thrashed her arms wildly and struck something, some limb or arm. She met the eyes of a dug, even more foreign than a sluissi: it had a proper head, legs and limbs, but stood upon its hands and maneuvered its legs like arms instead. It had a face like a camel or a rat. Its grin was horrible and ratlike. “You’re the one who’s an ugly molerat!” Rey added, and tried to smack it once more. It kicked her in the mouth.

Once she and the dug both got tired enough, the sluissi slithered between them and confronted Rey directly. She gasped at the sight of this child: she was a sweet, natural green all over, like her favorite coloring markers. She had a long flap of skin sticking out from the back of her head and a blank, stoic face.

“Where are you from?” said the Sluissi. “Your name?”

Rey said her name was Rey. Then she coughed. “I’m thirsty.”

“Sucks! Water’s only at mealtime so get used to it!” the dug shouted from the sluissi’s other side. “And get used to digging and cleaning, too. We’re the diggers and cleaners around here, right Mopsy? Ain’t we?”

“That’s what we do,” the Sluissi asserted. “And we scavenge things sometimes. When Unkar says to.” Rey didn’t know the meaning of the word. At the mention of Plutt’s name, she only hid her head in her knees. “You’ll feel better when you have a portion,” the sluissi added tonelessly.

The door opened later to reveal a barabel, human-shaped but reptilian-skinned. Its slit-pupil eyes found Rey immediately. He eyed her when he commanded the children to come outside to work. Rey was taken by an animal instinct to freeze before the predator; the dug child had to yank her hair to make her follow the others out.

She followed the dug, who followed the sluissi, who led them through the street of sand. They passed adults who did not look at them. They stopped at a group of metal objects in the sand, shaded by a cloth on two poles. When the sluissi coiled near one of the pieces, Rey mimicked her. The dug and the other human sat next.

The barabel had walked quietly behind them. He watched the children sitting in the sand. He addressed the newcomer. “If you don’t know what to do, ask Mopsy. Don’t talk to me.”

She nodded and did not talk.

The barabel dropped a mound of damp cloths in the center of their shade. Each took one chemical-laden rag and began to rub, rub, rub at the scavenged metal pieces in their laps. The children worked. The barabel stood within sight. He smoked a cigar and read from a holo. He was within Rey’s sight always; after one hour when he finally drifted away for a conversation, she leaned towards the sluissi.

“M-Mopsy,” she whispered the funny name unsurely, “Do you know where the ships are?” Mopsy said yes. “Can we go there? My parents forgot to take me with them.”

“No, they didn’t.”

Rey did not talk.

-

Time passed without her.

Without her consent, without care of how she quietly cried every night, time passed and nothing changed. Nothing but her thirst. Jakku was almost totally bereft of water, and Unkar Plutt gave it sparingly. He ruled Niima Outpost from a trading post, hoarding resources and weaponry. He ruled Rey’s nightmares. He ruled her life. He made her thirsty each day.

Rey followed Mopsy, the apparent leader of the caged children and one of the only sentients who would speak to her. When the dug did speak, he only yelled. When Rey did speak, it was to chastise the dug, or to say “Yes, Mopsy,” when the leader relayed orders from their master.

The dug ran on his hands out of their shaded spot. He showed their chaperone a concave piece of bluish durasteel. “Hesselo, look, look! I cleaned nine things already, I’m ready for more!”

“Nice, Gano.”

“I’m still here,” Rey whispered, half-aware, to the cracked satellite plate she held. Mopsy must have heard, but did not say anything to her.

The human boy was even closer and ignored her just as much. He looked down at his own half-oiled plate with such focus that no one could look him in the eye if they wanted to. The barabel who fetched them for daily work called him Kachua, but Kachua did not call anybody anything.

The three of them worked in silence for another minute. Gano then traipsed back to the shade and began to mock the others for their poor workmanship. Dugs were brash and confrontational by nature, but Unkar and Hesselo had tempered Gano somewhat. His mockery didn’t last long. Soon they were all quiet.

They made no sounds themselves, but Niima around them did: light clattering of metal and the rustling of tents and footsteps on sand. Sentient voices around them sounded in mutters and growls. As an argument broke out one street over, one of the poles holding up the cloth over their head quietly fell. Sunlight blasted them without warning.

Jakku’s sun stunned them all with its sudden stab of brightness and heat. It struck her not like a weightless light but something of solid matter, like an unforgiving hand, or a bat, or the torn-away leg of a table. Rey struggled not to cry.

She only cried when Hesselo threw portions and refilled water canteens at them.

_I’m still here, Mama I’m still here please come get me, I hate working._

Mopsy ignored her tears and helped her grow the portions again, dribbling the last of her water on them till they rose up like bread in an oven. But they didn’t taste much like bread. She ate them without complaint because Unkar Plutt may walk by, because Hesselo was looking at them from his shaded seat, and because the adults didn’t give them any other food. No food, only hot water under hot sun, no baths except for smelly wash-sponges and no bed.

The children slept on the tarps in their shed with cloth bundles for pillows, but Rey held hers close and curled her limbs around it. She slept by Mopsy. When Mopsy rose up in the night as though to go to work, Rey followed her. When Unkar Plutt himself opened the door of the shed, Rey froze and hid behind her. When he said it was time to scavenge a newfound wreck, she ran out the door so she would not be late or look inattentive to her work.

Unkar bid them to jump into the flatbed of an old quad and she did. Mopsy stared blankly over the railing, Gano snatched at blown-up dust as the quad motored on, and Kachua sat still.

_‘I want to go home. I want to go home—'_

“Stop talking, I’m sleepy,” Kachua groaned next to her. He scooted away like she had thorns or poison in her. Rey stopped talking.

They drove out of the innards of Niima and wove between blank dunes of sand, painted bluish in the cold night hour. Each one was more or less like the next one, each hill and flat valley like the one before. They stopped at a flat section of land where black spires and the torn spine of an old ship showed above the sand. The four children hopped out of the quad when commanded. They approached the wreck when commanded. They took flashlights and found cracks in the wreck to enter in when commanded. As she could not follow Mopsy into the slim crevice she slithered into, Rey got on her belly and crawled into a different one.

She was in a ship now, all dark but for the tiny sliver of light she had. She was in a ship with broken wires and no lights of its own and shafts torn open by impact and fire. There was no smoke, but it smelled like smoke. It smelled like it had burned alive.

 _‘I want to go home, I don’t want to work, I can’t work,’_ she thought, but her fears had escaped her mind yet again and sounded quietly in the metal shaft.

“What are you whining about? What’s up?” Gano said from somewhere behind her.

“I don’t want to work,” Rey gasped. She took in an astounding deep breath and screamed aloud: “I don’t want to _work!_ I want to go home! I want my mom!”

 _I WANT MY MOM_ echoed throughout the ship.

The ship blasted her shrill crying. It blasted _NO NO N O NOOO_ to the dunes outside; the children inside cried for the pain in their ears.

“Why are you still talking about that?” hissed Gano from a nearby ventilation opening. “Plutt said—”

“Rey, you have to do what Mr. Plutt says. You have to,” Mopsy said, again with her blank Sluissi face.

Her woeful echoes finally died when another voice rang them out of existence: “ _Get the hell up here or I’ll pull you damn eyes out! NOW!”_

Terror moved her. She crawled past quivering Gano, shoved wide-eyed Kachua out of her way, and dragged her body uphill in the slim tunnel. Mopsy had said nothing to help her, to stop this horrible thing and these horrible men, and nobody would. She hoped for help and rescue more than any child on Jakku ever had, she was sure, but nothing happened while she was crawling. Nobody came.

Rey crawled out the opening she’d entered and stood up in cold starlight. A limp breeze blew sand around her cloth boots. Unkar Plutt and Hesselo both stood tall and stoic in the moving sands.

When Plutt came alive and approached her, Rey jolted and almost fell to her knees. He grabbed at her arm the way he had the day she had been left in the shipyard.

“You were the one wailing down there?” he barked. Rey’s eyes pinched shut against the sudden buffet of Jakku sand. “You trying to let every scavenger around know about our wreck? Who the hell do you think you are?!”

“I’m—” Rey began, but she never ended.

She called for help, but nobody came.

Only the wind was there, blowing sand into her eyes and tied-up hair. Unkar stumbled and caught himself as the breeze grew to a hard burst of air that carried an angry wave of wild sand. Hesselo cursed aloud. The men covered their faces, the girl on the ground covered hers.

The sun was gone from the sky and yet the burst of howling wind was hot as Jakku’s noon.

Kylo Ren appears from the sand.

He staggers forth out of the wave, pushed by the hard wind before catching himself to stay standing. His boots press into the sand. He feels it give under his weight, responding to his physicality. The wind doesn’t move his hair but then it does. The cold of desert night doesn’t touch him but then it does. The two men of Niima and their caged children aren’t in his mind’s eye now but a stone’s throw away. The wind pulls at his both clothes and theirs. 

Instantly his eyes dart around in search of enemies. He feels for them in the Force, but there’s only emptiness in the desert. The sentients in front of him are dead to it. Everything around them is dead.

“You think you can _walk_ back home? That no bad men will snatch you and open your belly?” Hesselo ground out at the little girl. He showed her his crocodile’s teeth but she was too frozen with dread to talk. Kylo frantically averts his eyes.

The Force isn’t woven over the land and conjuring the effects of an environment like it would be in a vision. He’s trained to feel the seam of difference in the press of his boots in the sand and the wind moving his hair. It makes his hands twitch, knowing it’s no vision, but knowing no name for it. For a moment he doesn’t know a name for the girl standing a short distance away. She’s little and shaking and doesn’t have family here.

 _‘It’s Rey,’_ he thinks, and steps back as the knowledge bludgeons him.

His knowledge from Starkiller floods over her earliest days at Jakku that he had just witnessed: he’d seen the outpost and the fish sentient taskmaster, and so few beings in her life after. Most of her life was dunes and dunes and rusty sands, broken machinery, broken, bleeding skin and ever the gold-red-violet-heavy sun looking down on her while she walked and waited—for years. The child in front of him was not filled to the brim with loneliness but with dread. A feeling that her older self seemed to have shed entirely, as though it did not matter at all. 

Kylo looks on the little girl on the ground and fears her. When she was grown, he would fear her, too, and fervently hunt her in the snow. But somehow, he felt he’d been the one to be hunted and chased here to this desert. If she hadn’t done it herself, what did? Why the hell was he here?

 _‘Why did you bring me here,’_ he presses towards the little girl on the ground. But he regrets it as soon as it’s sent. The voice of the scavenger girl doesn’t exist in that younger body. He can feel as easily as the wind that his voice, too, passes through her. Even the gaze of the two taskmasters slides worthlessly over him.

The scavenger girl who escaped Starkiller isn’t here. There’s only this small, soft child who doesn’t know anything yet. She doesn’t know the sixty-one droid bases and can’t even mix oil. She still lives in the children’s shed because it hasn’t been torn down yet by Teedo’s men. She doesn’t know yet that Hesselo will use his spiked flail to club Mopsy in the head.

When he was twenty-four years old, Master floated and struck him with a club for punishment and he stood still for it while some of the knights watched him fall down and bleed. Rey had seen that in his mind from her prisoner’s chair.

Kylo staggers back from the little girl.

Away from her and this place, more punishments are waiting. Consequences are waiting for the godforsaken son of Han Solo. A chain tying him to the scavenger is there for him to hold on to. But this feels different.

Groaning, he turns around and walks away. His head is bowed, seeing his boots in sand and the edge of his hair and nothing, nothing else. His own stilted gait slows, then stops. Another step scrapes in the sand, but his body doesn’t travel forward. Another step and another, and he’s not moving. The godforsaken fucking _sand_ —

Behind him, Rey’s mind radiates terror like the hot mantle of a planet, and it’s being frozen just as fast. She is already unmaking these emotions, smothering them so that they won’t be real tomorrow. If he took this day from her on Starkiller, she would not even feel it. He should not be feeling this at all, when he’s not actively reaching into her mind. He should not be in this place at all.

“Never—coming—back,” spoke Plutt over her head while she looked away from him.

 _‘I want to go back,’_ Kylo thinks frantically. _‘Get me out—of her life—’_ He struggles violently to walk further away from this scene of her life. He tries to propel his body over the ground, move his legs individually, but he covers no distance. Every second, he remains the length of four or five quads away from Plutt. Every second he’s breathing the desert air is making him enraged.

The wind is picking up around him. It raises and flaps at his cape, but even that doesn’t make Rey’s two taskmasters see him. The worthless, heartless blobfish is grunting threats into her ear like he knows no fear. He speaks like he’s never been punished himself. He has never been choked.

“You will be on Jakku for life,” Plutt shouted at her, over the threatening wind.

Kylo whirls and shouts back at him, hoarse and wordless, arm raised. He will not be imprisoned on Jakku like her. As his arm moves so does the sand on the ground and in the air. In one second, the hard breeze is a hurricane that deafens his own cries and smothers the sentients in front of him. The air is flurrying rust-red and painful. The grit scrapes at his skin and his scar. It blows hard enough to tear through any Force vision in front of him. Kylo howls and the wind howls with him. The wind dies with his breath.

The grit rains down slowly like ash. He is leaning forward and panting. As the dust slowly clears, it reveals the same exact scene. He hadn’t torn through the vision, or the hypnosis, or whatever was creating this scene. He was still here. Rey had taken notice that Plutt and Hesselo were bowled over and distracted; she uncurled from her balled-up position and scrambled for the wreck once more. She dove for the same crevice in the hull she’d crawled into before with fear driving her in like prey from angered predators. The predators took their time getting up form the ground.

Neither one noticed Kylo Ren approaching them and standing an arm’s length in front of them.

“You told me it wasn’t storm season yet,” the barabel hissed, then coughed out a glob of spittle and sand.

“Storms happen,” Plutt grunted matter-of-factly back. “And that was just one bad wind. We’re early, we’ll get some gen plugs no matter what.”

Wide-eyed, tight-lipped, Kylo’s eyes darted between them and then over to the wreck where he heard faint rattling of the children’s scavenging efforts inside. There were no screeching echoes or sobs coming from it this time. Kylo considered screeching himself, but the thought was fleeting. He stared.

He stared while Plutt leaned his lolling, fleshy body against his decrepit quad and his barabel guard set about playing a hologame in the passenger’s seat, horrifyingly casual already. They did not see him. Rey hadn’t seen him. She was down in the wreck scavenging, not talking. Her mind was scalding what she had heard today from its surface. He knew this for fact.

Wordless again, Kylo’s eyes drifted away and so did he. He drifted away from the quad and towards the wreck and in between them. He stood quietly. His eyelid twitched on occasion. When the sun started to rise and color the sky, he came slightly more aware. His eyes followed the children when they came out of the wreck with armfuls of tiny mechanical parts he didn’t know. Rey had suckled the blood from her lip to assuage her thirst.

He followed them easily back to Niima by merely walking and appearing there. There, too, he walked around unnoticed. There, too, he could not stray far from Rey or the pack of children. When Plutt locked them in the shed again, he was standing outside of it. The blobfish made a remark about drinks for himself and his men and walked heedlessly through Kylo, who remained facing the shed.

Around him, Niima continued its business of poor and ramshackle civilization. Before him, locked away like a chained pet, was Rey the scavenger girl in her earliest youth. The dug and sluissi made noise inside the shed, but she did not.

He turned away from her again, in case it worked this time. The cushion of the medbay bed felt like it was a faraway thing instead of a place he lay sleeping and dreaming right now. Eventually he would be back to it. Eventually he would be on his way to face punishment. It felt nauseating. Again. The thought made him cold inside, made him bow his head. Too long and he’d start to shake again, unable to stop reacting to the weight of what lie waiting in the future for him. It made him hungry for something to ease the squeezing ache in his stomach.

This last made him start and look around in confusion.

Kylo felt hunger.

**Author's Note:**

> Barely made it in the last few minutes of 2019. 
> 
> Looking for constructive criticism, though I know the last 1k words or so fell apart b/c I'm speed-typing to post my last 2019 piece. Things I meant to accomplish with my liturarry wrytingwurds: Present tense for Kylo Ren being "projected" into Rey's past and past tense for Rey, that is on purpose // 5 or 6-year-old Rey shorting out when being told her parents left her here on purpose; Kylo's brain shorting out similarly when thinking of what he's done to his father and the consequences he'll face for it, but also using the intrigue of Rey to distract himself from that // Idk I'll add another thing or two in 2020
> 
> Rey will age faster from here on out; I won't make a few days or weeks take just 1 chapter after this. Jakku kindergarten won't last long. Believe it or not, my original draft in 2016 was almost twice as long and not even done. I've gotten better at cutting fat from my stories recently but need to be better still.


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